The Foodie Thread

Thomas Keller (The French Laundry and Per Se) puts creating great, brilliant food ahead of sustainability:

And, people freak out:

 

My favorite place which I have mentioned here before is all about the idea of local food. But I go there because the food is great, bot because of the local farms that they support.

If I'm laying out the kind of scratch that Keller charges, I want the best, not the closest.

 

Exactly. And, when he can, Keller uses local. Hell, he grows some of his own shit.

But, he owes it to his customers to provide the best possible meal. That doesn't always mean getting your provisions from down the road.

 

I do think that you can tell the freshness difference with locally sourced food. But that doesn't mean that I want oysters from the Passaic River.

 

Dinner tonight at Per Se. Service was extraordinary, food was terrific -- practically nothing you've not heard of, all done in ways you think you might be able to pull off if you had the time and the ability to oh, i don't know, slice celery so thinly you could read through it.

No 'airs' or 'foams' or 'essences', just six small plates that each made what came before better and laid the groundwork for what came next. And dessert, with its petits fours and cake and parfait and candy and macarons and more candy and candy to take home, might have been best of all.

 

Awesome. Jealous.

 

YF:

Have you read this?

http://www.amazon.com/The-Man-Who-Ate-World/dp/0805086692

Fun book, right up your alley. This thread just reminded me of it because Rayner (the author) talks about the local vs. best possible food debate.

 

Yeah, I agree with this. Is a chef or even a customer under some obligation to eat fish or meat that comes from so-called "sustainable" resources?

If you're really passionate about the argument, wouldn't it be better time spent to talk about the sustainability of beef used by fast food restaurants like McDonald's rather than one chef's handful (at best) of dining rooms?

Seems like a librul agenda to me.

 

Probably too late for your Milwaukee trip, but Smyth at the Iron Horse Hotel is excellent, and the entire lobby and other f&b venues (Branded, The Yard) are great places for a drink. My favorite hotel.

 

Eric Ripert's Le Bernardin receives another four star review from the New York Times. An incredible achievement.

 

My wife is in culinary school, so in the last few days, we've had homemade fried chicken and mashed potatoes; buttermilk pancakes; zucchini bread; cranberry-sour cream scones and French rolls. Some sort of orange-cream popsicle made with vanilla vodka is in the freezer waiting for a pool party later today.

She's in a pastry class this semester, so it's going to be a good summer.

 

Farewell column by Joanne Kates, who was the Globe & Mail's restaurant critic for 38 years and one of the most influential people in the Canadian food universe. She's covered the restaurant scene here beginning when it was a culinary backwater in the mid 70's to arguably one of the top restaurant cities in North America in 2012.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/food-and-wine/restaurant-reviews/joanne-kates-signs-off-after-38-years-as-the-globes-restaurant-critic/article2444041/


Her column ran every week except in the summer when she was up in Northern Ontario running a summer camp.

She's not exactly crazy about the new Toronto restaurant scene which seems to have been taken over by the worst combination imaginable: foodies and hipsters.

Few would dare open a white-tablecloth restaurant in Toronto, because everybody’s a foodie now, and Hogtown foodies have fallen for that determinedly downscale pork-centric thing. The going-out part has become less fun of late, thanks to the new style that has exploded here in the last two years. There has been a profound changing of the guard – usually a good thing in any culture, but in this case there is an unfortunate sameness to the new guard: The new restaurants mostly have unfriendly reservation policies (i.e., they don’t do it), they tend to have been opened on a shoestring (read: not so comfy and certainly not elegant), and the hot new places are not retailing variety. The food is all the same: Pork, formerly forgotten beef cuts, meat fat and more meat fat. Which could be partly because so many of them are either alumni of the Black Hoof or friends/protégés of the people of the Hoof.